From: John Hudson (tiro@tiro.com)
Date: Tue Dec 02 2003 - 20:07:19 EST
At 03:32 PM 12/2/2003, Philippe Verdy wrote:
>So there's an urgent need for authors to get solutions. It's up to font
>designers to provide a texhnical solution that allows them to license their
>font designs to authors once, and give these authors the freedom to sell or
>broadcast the documents they create with them.
Font designers are not the driving force in any technical solution: we
follow in the baggage train while software companies invent new
technologies to exploit our work. This isn't always a bad thing, but it is
seldom entirely a good thing. There are already plenty of technical
solutions for font embedding in documents: what is lacking is a financial,
licensing and digital rights solution that ensures that font developers are
properly paid for the value that their products add to such documents.
People seem to forget that the desktop publishing revolution was built at
the expense of the type industry, which used to be a large and lucrative
business and now no longer even qualifies to be called an industry, except
perhaps a cottage-industry. This too isn't completely a bad thing -- what
money there is in type is more widely distributed than it was, and it is
feasible for a type designer to make and sell his own work without relying
on a manufacturer or distributor --, but it does mean that the makers of
type are not in a position to lead technological developments.
John Hudson
Tiro Typeworks www.tiro.com
Vancouver, BC tiro@tiro.com
Theory set out to produce texts that could not be processed successfully
by the commonsensical assumptions that ordinary language puts into play.
There are texts of theory that resist meaning so powerfully ... that the
very process of failing to comprehend the text is part of what it has to offer
- Lentricchia & Mclaughlin, _Critical terms for literary study_
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